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It’s often said that experience is the best teacher, but the experiences of other people may be even better. If you saw a friend get chased by a neighborhood dog, for instance, you would learn to stay away from the dog without having to undergo that experience yourself. This kind of learning, known as observational learning, offers a major evolutionary […]
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Men who take once-daily aspirin have nearly double the risk of melanoma compared to men who are not exposed to daily aspirin, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. Women, however, do not have an increased risk in this large patient population. “Given the widespread use of aspirin and the potential clinical impact of the link to melanoma, patients and health […]
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A letter from three University of Chicago researchers in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine updates a 47-year-old series of reports on the risks of exposure during pregnancy to a supplement, diethylstilbestrol (DES), that was once widely used but since 1971 has been linked to a rare cancer: clear-cell adenocarcinoma of the vagina and cervix. In the May 3, […]
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Alzheimer’s disease destroys brain cells in part by promoting the formation of insoluble clumps that contain a protein called tau. Not only are these “tau aggregates” toxic for the cells that harbor them, but they also invade and destroy neighboring brain cells, or neurons, which speeds the cognitive decline associated with the Alzheimer’s. For those reasons, Alzheimer’s researchers have been […]
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In the first national study of the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in children across the US, researchers from Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, & Policy (CDDEP) in Washington, DC and Rush University in Chicago, IL examined national and regional trends of antibiotic resistance in clinical specimens over a 13-year period. While there was an overall increase between 1999 […]
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A heart-stopping condition that causes about half of all cardiovascular-related deaths seems to happen in an instant, with no symptoms. But several recent studies show that, sometimes, people who experience sudden cardiac arrest have warning signs hours and even weeks ahead of time. Experts say that’s why it’s important for everyone to be educated about the signs and to know […]
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UC San Francisco researchers have discovered a promising new line of attack against lethal, treatment-resistant prostate cancer. Analysis of hundreds of human prostate tumors revealed that the most aggressive cancers depend on a built-in cellular stress response to put a brake on their own hot-wired physiology. Experiments in mice and with human cells showed that blocking this stress response with […]
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Against the backdrop of increasing antibiotic resistance, the FORMAMP project has trialled nanotechnology-based delivery systems and antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), to deliver new tools in the fight against infectious diseases. It has been calculated that increased microbial resistance is responsible for an estimated 25 000 deaths per year, costing EUR 1.5 billion, across the EU. In the quest for new therapies […]
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This study evaluated the expression of PD-L1 and markers of immune mediated resistance in human medulloblastoma, the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor. In cell lines, SHH MB, which are low-MYC expressing, demonstrated both constitutive and inducible expression of PD-L1 while those in Group 3/4 that expressed high levels of MYC had only inducible expression. MB expresses low levels of […]
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People with severe mental illness have at least a two-and-a-half times higher risk of dying than the general population. In essence, people with severe mental illness are dying for the same sorts of reasons as the rest of the us – but there are more of them and they are dying younger. We examined the causes of deaths of almost […]
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